Cloud Champion – Round 5: Go To Market

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Welcome to the fifth week of our Cloud Champion campaign. This 12-week step-by-step course is designed to get you cloud competent and cloud confident. If you haven’t signed up yet, please visit www.microsoft.com.au/cloudchampion.

Last week we covered Business Transformation and finance tools to help you be profitable selling Cloud Solutions. This week is about going to market.

The slides and recording from the webinar will also be included in this post.

Marketing is more important than ever!
The role of marketing has become much more significant with cloud. We know business decision makers are looking for clarity and are approaching partners later in the sales cycle as they are doing more research. This means a complete overhaul in many partner’s marketing strategy. Yet so many partner websites don’t even feature cloud case studies. These could be small quotes how you helped a customer go from x to y to deliver z benefit. Another common oversight is the marketing strategy is often kept to the board room. Everybody in the company needs to be “pitch perfect” on the value proposition from the sales team to the receptionist team. One partner I know calls their reception staff “Chief Impression Officers” based on first impressions count. It’s a pretty good experience from the get go. If you are in marketing, how can you take the tools to help you more effective? If you are not in marketing, please ask yourself is your current sales & marketing approach ready to capture the attention of a modern business buyer?

Use the resources
Microsoft provides a wealth of resources for partners to use. These templates are a great start and can save hours of time as you don’t need to re-create the wheel. When you edit the generic content, think about how you can differentiate the content with your value proposition. These are 10 questions you could ask yourself (or your marketing team in your company):

  1. Why are you in business? (different question to what you do… more why you do what you do)
  2. What makes you unique? How do you stand out from the other partners?
  3. What are the 3 top challenges your customers face in 2-3 industries? How does your solution address this?
  4. What are the 3 reasons why customers seek your solution?
  5. How do your customers find you today? How can you help increase this?
  6. If you did a search for your company or the solution you offer, where do you appear?
  7. What are your customers saying about you socially/digitally? What would you like them to say?
  8. What are the consistent set of key words you use to ensure you receive as much “search engine juice” to get you to the first page of search results?
  9. What is the single most important message your team should communicate to your customers?
  10. Have you entered a Microsoft award recently, such as the Worldwide Partner Conference or Australia Partner Conference award ceremony to validate all of the above?

Microsoft Resources:

External partners:

Webinar Content: